There’s much to love about Even in the Slums of Providence, by Larry Pike. What I return to over and over, however, is the deeply contemplative tenor of these nuanced, beautiful, always direct poems. They remind us again and again of the daily sorrows and epiphanies that punctuate a life and the difficult enterprise of reconciling those extremes. Yet Pike obviously relies upon the muse of faith for his chiseled language, and “the holy wind that ignites the engine of imagination, / already circumnavigating the essential orbit of wonder.” The humility, the often Zen-like acknowledgement that the world is beyond our ken, permeates these poems. Often elegiac, but never maudlin, leavened cannily with gleaming wit, they chant long after you close this memorable volume.
–Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014) and author of The 13th Sunday after Pentecost
Both grave moments and youthful mischief ascend in this fine collection of poetry, providing a satisfying survey of human triumph, frailty, and uncertainty. The voice behind these poems is honest and generous, and filled with what can only be called gratitude. These are local poems of the best sort—real life is at hand and we live it and savor it, especially its imperfections and complexities. Yet something survives daily experience to resonate in the larger realm, where we count art and meaning, to sail wondrously toward the second life we contemplate in the afterglow of the first. This is a book that richly communes with that powerful and barely explicable second life, and thereby reminds us what poetry is for.
–Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter, Gone and the Going Away, and The Common Man
It’s wonderful to live for a time in the world of these subtle, unexpected, and moving poems. I like their sly humor, their companionable tone and unfailing generosity.
In poem after poem, in scene after perfectly rendered scene, Larry Pike finds poetry where it hides, often in plain sight: in hospital rooms, on teleconference calls, at wedding receptions, in sock drawers and airport terminals, and on and on.
The language here, like the captive buck Pike writes about in one poem, remains alert to “what is always just around the bend.” These fine, perceptive poems–no matter where they take us–never fail at what is surely one of poetry’s most vital tasks: “keeping the wild world in sight.”
–Davis McCombs, author of three collections of poetry and director of the Program in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas
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